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China Blocks Google.com, Gmail, Maps and More During 18th Party Congress
DavidGilbert99 writes "In an extraordinary move, the Chinese authorities have blocked access to Google.com, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and many more Google services as the Communist Party of China holds the 18th Party Congress. The blocking of these sites was reported by Chinese web monitoring site GreatFire.org, which said, 'Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website.' The latest move in a long line of disputes between the Chinese government and Google, it is unclear yet whether this denial will be temporary (like a similar one in 2010) or permanent."
Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.
What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.
I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.
I got a catholic block.
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
"The Chinese 18th Party Congress was cancelled after attendees were unable to find where it was located without using Google Maps."
Now let these companies stand strong, don't budge, and the people will become restless, they will become angry, and they will revolt against their government. Irony. The thing they are trying to prevent will cause a spark that will lead to their downfall.
How exactly blocking Gmail et al. would make China become backward?
I mean, it is a fair question.
You have no right to judge.
Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The ones who actually do something are either in the ground, in prison, or at the business end of an AK-47 in a "fun-time all-day (and all-night) exercise party" in fields or factories, or, if lucky, simple unemployed. The ones who care but don't do anything are, well, not doing anything, for fear of ending up in the first group. That's why Internet access is useful, it allows them to speak out with less fear of getting caught.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Are comments disabled on this post?
No. I am in Shanghai, and Slashdot is not blocked. It is possible that it is blocked in Beijing, where the party congress is being held, but to the best of my knowledge, Slashdot has never been blocked in China. It just isn't popular enough here to matter.
"Research without Google would be like life without electricity," says Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province.
It is generally possible to find information on the internet without using Google, but Google Scholar and the likes really is a world-class resource.
Sorry, but judging things is a fundamental human right. This is something that I have found largely misunderstood by my Chinese friends. They will say things like "There is no difference between the US government and the Chinese government, both are corrupt." While I agree with the corruption (although it is a much more straightforward sort in China), I think they miss a key element in the United States, i.e. we enjoy certain inalienable rights that they don't understand the benefit of, largely because they have never had them.
Americans, and really everyone in western style democracies are free to criticize and judge any government, religion, or belief they want to in a public forum. This is freedom of speech and it is the most important right we have.
I am not living in China, But I am a chinese and a member of the communist party. I think it is suck. I do not understand what are we fear for ?
I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The Chinese are no different from anyone else. They are happy to tolerate authoritarianism as long as the authorities deliver the economic goods, and the CCP has been extremely successful at that (greater than 10% annual growth for 30 years straight). It is no different anywhere else. The Arab Spring was not about democracy, it was about economic stagnation.
Until the Chinese economy has a major recession (which it will eventually), the CCP has nothing to worry about.
I am in China now. Guangdong province.
Slashdot is not blocked.
google doesn't work 90% of the time and is horribly horribly slow even though the google Hong Kong server is only a few hours away by boat. The web browser keeps throwing errors about invalid compression and it stops loading the page after waiting about 5 mins.. Gmail is working off and on. The more you use google and Gmail, the slower and less reliable they get to the point where I have to use Bing or taobao instead and a mail client because Gmail sits there for 30 mins with a progress bar and connectivity problems while trying to load my inbox. Gmail's imap works well in that i canMeventually send and receive mail if i wait long enough. My OpenVPN to my home PC in the states works well for about 5 mins and then drops to 5KB/sec and stays there unless i get a new ip from my isp.
I use reader on my tablet to get news via rss and the google proxy for that is almost always broken with messages about the google server having an error or the server timed out. It's very frustrating.
Bing works very well here. It is much faster than baidu and it is never broken like google.
You have no right to judge.
Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.
There's also this thing about "needing a right" before we're allowed to do anything.
Even supposing the OP is correct, we actually have no right to judge, it's completely irrelevant.
We can do whatever the fuck we want, we're not limited in our actions to some inclusive list of "rights". The OP has rights that we can't abridge, but beyond that we're free to do as we please.
We don't have the right to judge (according to the OP), but we will do it anyway. China is wrong, their actions are less effective than actions based on freedom, and the sum total of all their authoritarian moves will eventually cause their downfall. Free regimes will outcompete authoritarianism in the long run in every case. "The illogic of waste".
What the hell hell part of "Communist " wouldn't a nerd understated?
I would say the majority of Slashdot have no clue. I see repeated posts calling America a 'police state' or if there is some censorship there is a cry that there is nowhere worse on the planet than the USA. Those that have never left their mother's basement have no idea what a real police state means, or what censorship means. It doesn't occur to them as they post their rants on a forum that in a lot of the world that forum wouldn't exist in the first place.
The United States is not a democracy.
But we ARE democratic.
Also, no-true-scotsman fallacy. If a nation has a system where the leaders are put into power by the masses, it's a democracy.
Whine all you want about the oddities of the electoral college (and it IS pretty messed up), but people vote and have an influence, no matter how small, over who leads them. If the USA isn't a democracy, what is?